Abstract

The NHS Plan (Secretary of State for Health, 2000) called for partnership and co-operation at all levels to ensure a seamless service of patient centred care. These propositions were spelt out in the NHS workforce strategy (Department of Health, 2000) which called for education and training which was “genuinely multi-professional” to promote and include:

Teamwork

Partnership and collaboration between professions, between agencies and with patients

Skill mix and flexible working between professions

Within the United Kingdom the use of simulated patients as a teaching and learning strategy is gaining momentum to not only provide an inter-professional approach to the learning needs of students but also to place learning into ‘context’. As such the Department of Adult and Children’s Nursing, University of Huddersfield is working in partnership to provide student nurses with an ‘in context’ focus on their learning ensuring that the students learn in an interprofessional environment.

This paper discusses the use of simulated patients as a teaching and learning strategy and explores how it develops the students’ communication, interpersonal and problem solving skills that can be transferred from the academic to the clinical areas.